The idea book for product thinkers.
Build deliberately.
Work an idea out fully before you hand it to your engineering team or agent.
Building software has gotten fast.
Your engineering team ships faster with AI tools, or maybe you’re a solo founder utilizing AI as your entire product team. Either way, the build step is no longer the bottleneck in crafting software.
The biggest pain point now is knowing what to build.
Who is your user?
What problem is your product solving?
What is the best way to solve your user’s problem?
If you’re using AI heavily, these UX questions can get lost and you can end up with a feature that doesn’t serve your user.
Walden helps you to ask the right questions early on, and throughout the planning process. It helps you to build deliberately.
Walden works for product thinkers who want to craft better user experiences.
Everything you need to work an idea out, before anyone starts building.
Shape your idea into a pitch.
Every idea in Walden becomes a pitch with five parts: the problem, what it’s worth, the approach, the unknowns, and what you’re not doing. Walden shows you how deep each part goes, from sketched to ready, and the next thing to settle, so you can see whether your team or agent could pick it up without coming back to you with questions.
The pitch
Get your pitch read before it’s built.
Ask a second reader to look at your pitch the way a builder would, or whoever decides, or a skeptic. You can also write your own readers, like the customer you’re building for. They ask questions in the margin, but they never rewrite your pitch. If a question matters, keep it and it becomes an unknown to work through.
Readers
Catch the edge cases early.
If you leave a gap, your agent will fill it, and not always the way you’d want. Walden flags an approach that’s too loose to build until the everyday cases are worked out: what happens when a link won’t load, when someone leaves halfway, when they come back later. Anything unresolved stays on the page as an open question.
Edge cases
Add context about your product.
Connect your project to its repository and Walden reads your codebase: the files, the routes, the schema. The readers, the chat and the UI sketches all use that context, so the questions you get are about your product, not software in general.
Context
See how it works before it’s designed.
Map out the screens and how a user moves between them. Walden sketches fragments of each screen to illustrate what happens there, and leaves the designing to your designer. Pin notes on a sketch to pass on what you know.
Flow and sketches
Work it out here. Hand it off whole.
What you craft in Walden becomes an artifact you can hand to your engineering team or your agent. The goal is to work through a problem until you find the best solution.
By then you’ve worked through the edge cases, what you won’t do, and what’s out of scope. You understand the problem space fully. That deliberate planning makes for a better build, and a better experience for the people who use it.
Know when it’s ready to hand off.
Walden reads your pitch and asks whether someone could pick it up without coming back to you. Each part gets two checks: does it do its job, and could a builder work from it? Room you leave the builder on purpose counts as decided.
It never blocks you. It shows you the next thing to settle, and you decide when to hand it off.
Keep running your team the way you run it.
Walden fits into any software development process. We borrowed ideas from Shape Up and from product-minded engineering, but it works alongside the tools you already use: Jira, Linear, Notion and the rest.
We just help you and your team craft a better pitch.
Sketched
Each part says something
Shaped
Each part does its job
Ready
Nobody has to come back to you
Handed off
It left Walden. What happens next is yours to run
Walden stops here
Then, your tools
Jira, Linear, Notion, GitHub, or your coding agent.
Plan it with your team.
Invite your designers and engineers while the pitch is still taking shape. They see what’s open, follow along as it changes, and leave their questions in the margin, so the edge cases get caught before anyone starts building.
Editors write the pitch with you. Viewers read along and ask questions, for free.
Start planning for free.
Walden is free to use. Upgrade when you want more AI credits, or when you want to bring your team into the planning process.
Free
$0forever
Everything you need to start planning.
- Pitches, flows, sketches and canvases
- Present your pitch, and export it as a PDF or a package
- 20 credits to start, then 5 a day
- No credit card, no time limit
Personal
$20a month
For solo founders and product thinkers doing the planning.
- Everything in Free
- 400 credits a month
- Unused credits carry over a month
- Top up any time: $10 for 150 credits
- Use your own model key if you have one
Team
$30per person, a month
Bring design and engineering into the planning process.
- A shared workspace for your team’s ideas
- Invite your designers and engineers to read along and leave questions
- See who’s looking at a pitch with you
- 400 credits per person, shared across the team
- Unused credits carry over a month
- Top up any time: $10 for 150 credits
- Use your own model key
Every plan starts free. You can upgrade from inside the app whenever you’re ready.
Ready to build deliberately?
Start with an idea, work it out fully, and hand it off to your engineering team or agent.